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He knew the way too well now, familiar with every late-night shadow, every unsteady creak of the corridors. His feet carried him to her door on autopilot, head already somewhere far away by the time he chose to find her. It was most often on late nights, when it was too late for him to take a sleeping pill and wake up reasonably; when he didn’t take them, feeling somewhere inside like there was a better option, should he have trouble. The night was when his inhibitions lowered already, insomnia only made that worse; it made him vulnerable, painfully so. Every time he sought her out, he was coming to her door with his heart on a silver platter, the muddled thoughts in his head strung together into a plea.
She never had him say it. Never asked anything.
He knocked. The door opened before his hand connected the second time, Eva’s room softly illuminated already. She was in her sleep clothes, this set with a spaghetti strap beige shirt and wide, dark pants. Her hand was on his own in seconds, dragging him inside, wordless as always.
“Brushed your teeth?” she asked. She always did.
Ryland nodded. She brushed a hand thorough his hair.
“Would you like me to read?”
He shook his head, yawning already, leaning into her touch. She was a cool summer breeze on the beach, and he chased it, a man overheated and seeking a quiet respite from the noise and scorching hot of the sunny, open expanse of sand.
“To bed with you, then,” she pushed him slightly, never doing much more than brushing her fingertips on the back of his shoulder or at the end of his spine. He never needed any more than that, never needed any encouragement outside of a soft there you are and sweet dreams, manekke and I’ll keep you safe, like he was something precious. She was too good at it, too much sometimes, but even then, she held him near her shoulder as he cried, didn’t ask for an explanation as to why.
They didn’t always go to sleep immediately. Sometimes, his mind was too quiet, staticky and all too easy to overwhelm after a hectic day, and he would drag himself to her door only slightly after midnight, when the other inhabitants of Stratt’s Vat still prowled the corridors. She would let him sit next to her on the couch in her office, then, or have him lay with his head in her lap on her bed as she finished off whatever bureaucratic dilemma she was getting through. She was always planning, always at the edge of causing another scandal, and she whispered this and that to him when she knew his greatest contribution would be a ‘that’s bad’.
He’d had this happen before in his life, as he came to realise. Very rarely, maybe only once, sometime around his father’s funeral, and it never truly hit what it meant. He still didn’t understand it, but now he had a better solution than watching the same ten episodes of Star Trek, wrapped in a blanket on his couch and stuffing himself with microwave popcorn and chocolate yoghurt. He had a place to go, the lighthouse to his confused ship, who offered him the simplest of comforts and still made him feel safer, better. Who let him lean on her and gave him hot chocolate and read him the one book from her childhood that she still carried with her.
It wasn’t too often, that he came. A few times in the week after their initial agreement, but then his mind calmed, the routine of the aircraft carrier seeped in and despite the continued high-stress of the job he only visited once, maybe twice, in the following two months. She never questioned that, either. She was Eva Stratt, who saw a problem and found the most efficient solution, who didn’t care if it was cruel, if others saw it as evil, but also if it was unorthodox and perhaps shameful.
She dragged a finger down his nose, brushed his hair off his face as he settled his head on her chest.
“You’re thinking.”
He hummed. He wrapped his arms around her and squeezed, so blissfully comfortable. His mind was half disengaged, had been autonomously deciding enough was enough since some undefined moment in his life and shoving him into this state of compliance, of defencelessness; and Eva Stratt somehow knew what to do with him.
“You just…” his words were muffled by her shirt, slurred by the comforting dragging of her nails against his scalp. “Thank you, Eva, comfy…”
The sentence was strung out of half-finished thoughts. She still understood; she most often did.
She laughed quietly. Even now, it was still a sound that was choked, her automatic reflex to shut it down before it fully began.
“Thank you, too, Rylie,” she said. “You trust me. I’m not sure that’s wise, but you do. It makes a lot of… everything easier.”
She did that too; an honesty like he rarely heard from her. She knew she was talking to someone who would understand the full weight of her words a few hours in the future, but nevertheless, she shared them, no filter. Her thoughts in exchange for Ryland’s lack of inhibitions.
When his mind cleared, he could seldom place if that was a right exchange. If it was fair. Could never find towards whom the scale tipped if it wasn’t.
“’night.”
She reached over and turned the camp lamp off.
“Welterusten.”
He approached the two lab techs not unlike he would approach a middle schooler who had completed the impossible feat of making Mr Grace truly, properly angry.
The one on the left, a thirty-something woman whose hands still sometimes shook a bit too much when she poured out agar plates, but who had somehow proven herself capable enough, special enough to have Stratt recruit her, paled. Her hands folded over her chest and she looked away. When he was still quite far away, she pointed him out to her companion, whose expression fell and mouth shut mid-sentence.
Grace raised the vial rack in his hand, wordless.
Neither one of them said a word. Around them, people were busy with their own tasks, but Grace did not care. He knew at least a few of them were already eyeing the three of them, too curious for their own good, and couldn’t bring himself to care about that either.
“I’m listening.”
He’d maybe given a proper lecturing three times in his career. Once, Amanda had broken the window while arguing with her friend who had apparently cheated off her during a test. Grace felt a little bad when he realised the accusation was a 100% correct, and he ended up having the other retake the test, but he couldn’t let the assailant get off without behavioural management and a full, twenty-minute talking to about safety and respecting others and solving problems without violence. The second time, a boy not in his class had stolen a healthy bunch of the rewards he held for his students in a locked drawer in his desk. Grace had forgotten to shut it with the key, that time, and the boy snuck in after one of his classes when Grace was the hall monitor and took his loot. Fortunately, he was caught on cameras, and Grace had to truly hold himself back that time, force his voice almost to a whisper to stop himself from yelling. The third time was perhaps the worst of all, because the students fully didn’t deserve it. Grace had had a bad bout of insomnia around that time, too, something to do with Marissa entering what he’d thought was clearly only a hair away from an abusive relationship, and she wouldn’t listen to him when he told her to pull the breaks and get out before it was too late. The kids were just fooling around, tossing a paper ball at each other and had it accidentally land at his feet. It didn’t even hit him, and on any other day, he would have smiled and tilted his head, then given a warning and a reminder of respect, maybe taken one of their beanbags away, nothing too harsh unless they kept acting that way.
He wouldn’t have dragged them outside, stood them in the hall and gone on a rant, asking them what they thought they were doing, why they thought it was okay and if they had any idea of respect, any respect for themselves and for everyone else. Half of it was things he’d told Marissa a thousand times by that point and had it fall on deaf ears, half of it was nonsense, strung together into something that only resembled a sentence by his overtired mind.
He apologised for his harshness on the next occasion.
He stood in front of the two techs, eyebrows raised, and knew this would be his fourth time that he lectured someone with anger in his veins.
Neither of them moved. No word fell.
He coughed, shaking the rack in his hand.
“Which one of you mislabeled the reagents. No, let me clarify. Which one of you took my labelled reagents, moved them gosh knows where or for all I know, threw them away, and put a mislabelled falcon of fudging ethanol in place of PBS?” he shut his mouth before he started yelling, and took a deep breath. He adjusted his glasses with his elbow. “You’re lucky I have a working nose and smelled it immediately. You’re lucky I didn’t just drown my cells in 70% contaminated ethanol because it says phosphate-buffered saline.”
He set the rack on the table.
“I know it was one of you two. Tell me.”
The girl’s companion, a man about her age and with wide eyes and close cropped hair that perhaps made him seem better prepared for the job than he was, raised a shaky hand.
Grace eyed them both again. How did they get hired by Stratt. They were a mess. She was barely able to keep herself from spilling any solution and he still couldn’t remember the order of reagents in any given storage closet.
Grace nodded. He looked at the man’s bare hands and took off his own gloves, then grabbed him by the hand.
“You’re going to talk to Ms. Stratt. You’re going to explain yourself to her. Then you’re going to come back here and find me my—”
“Doctor Grace.”
He stopped. Her voice came in through the speakers, loud and clear. He let go of the lab tech, suddenly conscious of the insanity that grabbing him as he did was, but nevertheless motioned for the man to walk with him towards the lab exit, only looking at Stratt for a second to make sure she saw him as he held up a hand.
They got to her in minutes. Grace stood over the tech as the other washed his hands, eyes trained on the action like he was only waiting for the man to slip up.
Even still, when they reached Stratt, she already looked impatient.
“Who is this?” she asked.
Grace grimaced.
“Incompetent man you hired.”
Stratt looked the tech up and down, her cheek indented slightly; Grace guessed she was chewing on the inside of it, like he did sometimes when he couldn’t focus and couldn’t find any other object to bite on.
“What’s the problem?”
“I almost drowned my cells in ethanol,” Grace said. His anger didn’t leave him, but it slowed down to a steady simmer in the background of his thoughts. Stratt had that effect, that power to make his mind reorganise itself around emotion until they followed a more logical pattern; like her brain waves influenced his, on some strange, undiscovered level. It wasn’t always the case, but often enough for Grace to have noticed. “That’s bad.”
She looked at him, all the solemn, sad eyes and neutral mouth, as she always was. Steady and unchanging, whenever he looked at her.
“Why?”
“Most cells start dying at a high enough concentration. This was the high enough concentration. Even if it didn’t outright kill them, it would have messed up the other reagents. And probably altered the cell membrane anyway. Not. Good.”
“But you caught it?”
“I did. I have a nose.”
She smiled the way she did, invisible unless you were looking for it. It was an expression between a grimace and a grin, if either of the two was subdued to a minimum.
She turned to the lab tech again.
“You signed an NDA when you were hired, I am certain of that. You’re fired.”
In hindsight, that wasn’t when the problem started; but that was when he noticed it, when he had it brought to his attention.
Grace heard it first when he was getting food in the evening. Evening was a generous way to describe 11 pm, he knew, but it was the way he operated, and it seemed to work, for now. More or less.
It was Lokken and another scientist in the mess hall when he entered, angling himself towards a place to acquire a meal. He didn’t pay them any mind; didn’t notice they were there until he walked right past them. It wasn’t intentional. He didn’t mean to eavesdrop.
“He’s like a male Stratt,” the other scientist whispered to Lokken.
Grace turned on his heel. Lokken met his eyes and her face went through three different expressions before settling again.
She hit her companion with her hand, then again when he didn’t stop talking. Finally, when it still didn’t work, she leaned in and hissed, still making eye contact with Grace.
“He’s here.”
Grace was bad at putting things together in social contexts, too often for it to not have become noticeable. But he’d have to be stupid to not add the two pieces of information together.
He stood frozen in place. Lokken had looked away but his eyes remained staring at her, not out of any malice but simply as another element of him digesting the words. His hand travelled up, slowly, to where his necklace was wrapped around his neck, and it unearthed it from beneath his collar at an equally leisurely pace. Finally, it was at his lips, at which point he bit down on the silicone, almost too hard.
He kept thinking, though the words in his mind were only loud exclamations of “What?” and “Why?”.
Lokken waved to him, her brows furrowed.
He didn’t react. He remained for a few seconds longer, still chewing on his pendant and staring off in her vague direction, until his mind eventually moved on from the singular shock of the revelation, of being perceived as… as a person he never thought himself to be, and he turned around once more.
He ate, pretending like that conversation had happened without him hearing a single sound.
It continued on like that, for the week. No amount of stupid science pun shirts and Grace acting exactly as he did all the time, ungraceful and perhaps too silly for the job he was tasked with, no amount of making a joke and praising a coworker for anything at all would help it.
Nobody was scared of him, nothing of the sort. Grace, though it bit at his ego sometimes, knew that he was one of those people that would never be able to intimidate another man into anything. He was too much of the nerd stereotype, for that. There was too much emotion in him, at any given moment.
Despite that fact, he knew they were treating him differently. Instead of laughing politely whenever he made a particularly bad joke, some of the people would make an expression like they bit on something sour, and others would dial it up the other way and laugh too forcibly for even Grace to believe it.
It was funny. They were acting like he had any sort of Stratt-like influence, which was silly, because in a way, he did. He wasn’t anyone special to her, but he was the person she had decided would be best to take to any given meeting, to have him whisper to her the explanations of the science she relied on but could barely understand. But she’d never truly given him any power, and he would have never made use of it if it had been offered.
It was unreasonable of them; and that thought felt too much like Eva Stratt had placed it into his mind with her own two hands, those same ones that scratched soothing patterns into his scalp.
It was one thing, for Grace to be mildly affected by how much time he spent playing Stratt’s pocket scientist, attending meetings with her as her subordinate and listening to the way she was. It was one thing for him to perhaps be affected by the late night visits to her, by the way that mornings usually had her back to her sharp edges and methodical approach unsoftened by care, by simplicity, and how Grace would spend a few minutes talking, as though they were friends, with that version of Stratt. It was one thing, because it was him. It was him, who absorbed teen slang like a sponge and then said it back at the kids to make them groan and cringe, who got his humour from a ‘herd of schoolchildren’, as Stratt had put it.
Stratt was talking to him, asking about the progress during the week. They were in her office, Friday evening, a set meeting, one they’d been having for months.
Stratt was chewing on the side of her finger. Whenever she paused, it would find its way between his teeth, wedge itself there and her mouth would close around it ever so slightly as she listened, as she came up with what to say next. And then—
“Doctor Grace?” she articulated louder, words cutting through the air and shaking him out of his focus. “Focus.”
She worried her lower lip between her index finger and her thumb, Stratt herself seeming utterly unaware of it. He was silent, staring at her face, observing. Subject Eva Stratt, initial observations—
Her finger ended up back between her teeth and she bit on the nail, then on the pad, then on the side of it.
Grace shook himself free of his thoughts.
“Stratt.” He said.
She stared at him, unimpressed.
“Doctor Grace.”
He held up his hand, then let it morph into a single finger being pointed up, in between them. He shook it a few times, trying to find the words, trying to make it sensible.
“Eva—Stratt,” he said, again.
She didn’t dignify that with a response.
He thought for a few seconds more. Eventually, he settled on: “your hand.”
“Fingers. What are you doing?” he pointed to the thumb still in between her teeth.
She blinked.
She slowly moved her hand, the one at her lips, away, down, below the table. The motion of her elbow suggested to Grace that she wiped the spit on her pants.
She kept her eyes on him, and unwavering stare as usual, for a second, then another.
“If I start making terrible science puns, I will have to fire you.” She said.
Grace snorted. His glasses almost fell off his face as he fell forward, his hands on his thighs, and laughed. The giggles spilled out of him in uncontrollable waves. He’d somehow given Eva Stratt his oral fixation. This was the funniest day of his life, and for that moment, his mind ignored all that was wrong with everything else.
He didn’t need to look at Stratt to know what she was doing. She was staring at him, hands at her sides, legs likely crossed beneath the table, her face impassive, her dog-like eyes making it softer than it had any right to be, the way she was, and the only signifier of emotion a gentle quirk of her left eyebrow—an “are you done?” with no sound.
Doctor Lokken picked that moment to enter the office. She got two steps in before Grace noticed her; she clearly didn’t notice him before then either, in spite of his over-the-top amusement.
“Ms. Stratt, I have the preliminary—Doctor… Doctor Grace.”
“Oh, no, I’m Doctor Ryland Grace. Doctor Doctor Grace is my cousin,” he said through the laughter, unable to help himself.
Stratt sighed heavily.
“Doctor Lokken, the preliminary results?”
But Lokken was already backing away, her hands folded over her chest, her mouth a thin line.
“I see you two are busy.”
Grace looked at Stratt when the door closed and laughed even harder.
“She—she’s going to think—”
Stratt pinched the bridge of her nose. She looked to be at the end of her patience for him, and he found that too funny too. Maybe he was approaching a sort of inevitable psychotic break.
“Doctor Grace. Can you be, how do I put it, a grown, serious man for another minute so we are able to finish the meeting?”
He was only able to reign in his laughter for long enough to look her in the eyes and say:
“You know me too well to think I’m capable of that right now.”
Doctor Lokken was glaring at him. She had found him in the canteen, forcing tomato soup down his throat with a grimace that he was well aware was visible to everyone. She’d sat down opposite him, placed her own bowl of soup in front of her, and stared, making no move to so much as pick up a spoon.
Grace shoved another spoon of liquid into his mouth. He had relented to his body and was making himself eat so his stomach would shut up for long enough to get anything done. Unfortunately, tomato soup was not on the list of foods he remotely tolerated.
Her eyes traced over his face. She was scowling, and every so often she would look down at her hands and clench the fists before returning to her previous activity—glaring at him.
Another spoonful. He was disappointed to see he still had half a bowl left.
“You eat like a toddler.”
He choked on the liquid, sputtering. Some of it got on her and she grimaced even harder, then took her napkin and harshly wiped it off, eyes never leaving him.
“I’m sorry I don’t enjoy every dish on the planet,” he chuckled. “To be fair, tomato was already doomed, as a thing, for me. To-mate-oh! How about, to mate, no.”
She looked away, finally, but only to look to the side and hold up her hands like she was considering strangling him. She looked like she didn’t believe he made the joke, like it was an offence he’d dare say the words. Grace raised an eyebrow at her, letting it distract him from the flavour in his mouth.
When she looked at him again, her mouth was already opened. His was closed around the spoon again.
“Whatever you have going on with Stratt is… do you not respect yourself? Have you seen her?”
He swallowed.
“And what do we have going on, exactly?”
Lokken furrowed her brows and shook her head at him. She opened her mouth a few times, then closed it, and her arms folded over her chest. Was she offended?
“You think I’m stupid? You’re—”
“I’m not having sex with her, Lokken—”
“Like hell you aren’t.” she snapped. Grace pushed the bowl of soup away from himself and placed the spoon back on the table. He grabbed his pendant through his shirt, tried to squish the irritation that flared up inside him.
“How is it even your business?”
“So, you are. You’re sleeping with her. That—that demon of a woman, and you’re having sex because, what, it gives you a power trip?” Lokken spat out, ignoring him. “Do you like it, when she dominates you? I bet she does. What is wrong with you?”
He clenched his fists, had to take a few deep breaths to keep his voice steady.
“I’m not sleeping with her.”
She stood up. Her soup bowl rattled on the table as it shook with the pressure she suddenly placed on it. The liquid spilled overboard, a small drizzle of translucent red on metal.
“You’re a coward, Grace.”
They spent most of their time annoyed at each other, then more annoyed at each other. She was excited, that time she’d shown him the hull plans, and that was a moment where Grace let himself entertain the notion that she wasn’t terrible; she’d never be his favourite person in the world, but he thought that her mind was brilliant and that she could be, when she wasn’t insulting him every other sentence, tolerable.
It was a very short-lived impression.
He didn’t dignify her with a response. He couldn’t, not without saying something he would regret. He fiddled with his necklace through his shirt.
“You should at least be able to admit what you’re doing. But you run. From this, you run. From science, when you were deservedly criticised, you run. Will you run from the project, too, the moment it gets too difficult?”
He met her eyes with his jaw set. He thought of his students, of when a child would come to stomp and cry at him with too much frustration to truly be over something as trivial as a bad grade.
“Do you feel better, now?”
She breathed in sharply. Offended, even more so.
“I’m not some child having a tantrum.”
And she stormed off. Grace looked at his soup critically and gave up on eating. He got up, ready to dispose of it, when something hit the side of his head and the world turned to black.
He woke up with a start, with his heart in his throat and his mind not there. Lokken was crouched next to him, tears streaming down her face. He frowned.
“What—?” anything more was too hard to articulate, with no breath.
“Some fucking hit. You’re her closest man and she doesn’t give you a full day security detail,” Lokken muttered under her breath. She didn’t seem to have noticed he came to.
“Lokken,” he coughed. She met his eyes, startled.
He averted his gaze.
“What?”
“What.”
She breathed in deeply.
“Someone knocked you out. A hit, or some bullshit. Because you’re trying to save the world.”
His breath stuck in his throat. His heart, already hammering way too intensely, picked up speed even more.
“Hit?”
Lokken didn’t look at him, kept her eyes behind him, focused on a commotion that Grace experienced as though through high water.
“Yes. They tried to take you out but the security people did their job and got them to the ground before they pushed you overboard. I don’t know how they got on this ship, and if they had anybody else working with them. They’re taking care of it—”
Someone had tried to kill him. Somebody tried to take his life.
He could die.
Lokken must have noticed the way his breathing sped up even more and she forced herself to look at him. Her eyes were narrowed and red, tear tracks cutting a path through her foundation and leaving behind faint smudges of her brown mascara. Her face was too close to his, close enough that he felt her breath hit his nose. In the twist of her mouth and the panicked trailing of her eyes, there was too much care for someone who had just argued with him as she did.
“Doctor Grace,” she sighed, placing a hand on his shoulder. He flinched, his heart frantic. He needed to run, to get away, to save his life. “Breathe, it’s going to be fine—”
He pushed off the ground onto unsteady feet, his eyes glancing all over the place, never lingering for longer than a second. His hands shook, his body rife with adrenaline.
He could have died. He almost died. Somebody tried to kill him. He was almost murdered.
His mind couldn’t wrap itself around the concept, horrified. He was a mouse hiding away from predatory birds, hoping they didn’t notice his small body in tall grass. Why did they try to kill him? Why not somebody else? Somebody more important?
He took a few steps back, letting his eyes wander back to Lokken every once in a while. She was looking at him with equally wide eyes, one of her hands fervently rubbing at her left cheek as though she was trying to vanish any trace of the tears that had fallen there.
She was as scared as he was. Whether it was for her own life, or for him, Grace didn’t know.
He had to run.
He blinked, and Lokken’s eyes were no longer on him. That was the last tether holding him in place, snapping in half.
He turned around and broke into a sprint with no clear goal. This was all too much, somebody had almost killed him. What the fuck. He almost died. He was here, he was alive, but it was only by, what, mere luck? By the competency of another person who saved him? He didn’t even get to ask who it was. He almost died. He was halfway to his grave already, because he was associated with this project. He was helping humanity, and that’s how they paid him back—with a rifle to the head. Was that it? They almost murdered him. Someone looked at him and decided his life would be better ended right that instant.
He almost died, he almost died, he almost—
His ran into something hard. His head hit hard material, bone or wall, he didn’t know, his feet lost their balance and tripped over one another, his hands, too steady by way of adrenaline, came up, but instead of catching his fall they clutched at his aching head. His vision was spinning and his ears rung in a high pitched scream.
“Grace? Grace, what—”
He grabbed Eva’s shoulders for balance, digging his fingers into her soft forearms like she was his lifeline.
“They tried to kill me!”
He was crying. He didn’t know when it’d started, when his panic had kicked off that particular physiological response. It was all too much. He needed to calm down, but he couldn’t stop the fear that rose high in his throat, a bodily need to be protected.
Eva bit her knuckle, wincing the longer his hands remained locked in a death grip on her arms. She searched his face, then the room around them. Grace didn’t recognise it; maybe it was somebody else’s office, maybe it was a conference room, he didn’t care.
“Doctor Grace, I have a meeting,” she began to pry his fingers off herself. He choked, so short of breath that his chest didn’t manage to move fast enough to supply him with oxygen.
“’one almost killed me—Eva—shoot, I—sorry, I need—” he didn’t have anything he wanted to say, only this scrambled puzzle of something that was once perhaps a thought but had since shattered into an unmendable shape.
She tucked some of her hair behind her ear. Her eyes wandered around the room again, and came back to Ryland with a stoic resolution.
“Dismissed. We will reconvene at a later date. Teams message in half an hour to select a time and place.”
Ryland didn’t notice the people leave, didn’t care. Panic clawed at him still, unstoppable and unceasing.
Eva managed to detach him from herself after a few seconds of struggle, her hands holding his wrists and her eyes locked with his. She stepped forward, nudged his foot back with her own, and walked them to a wall in this pattern, a broken waltz; there, she lowered them both to the ground, leading Ryland with her hold and kneeling in front of him when he sat down. She lowered his hands to the ground, let his wrists free.
“You have to breathe, Rylie.”
He was pushing breath out more than he was taking it in. She frowned. Her hand found his nose and she clamped it shut with her fingers. Ryland let out a cry, tried to shake her off. She pet his hair with her other hand, shushed him quietly.
“Breathe through your mouth,” she said. She took in a gulping breath, ostensibly opening her mouth as though to take a bite of the air, then held it inside with her cheeks puffed, until she released it with a whoosh. She repeated the action again, and again, each time loosening her hold on his nose as he followed suit.
“You’re doing well,” she praised. “Keep breathing.”
She let go of his nose, moved her hand to lay over his, still doing that exaggerated pantomime of a calm breath. Ryland’s eyes kept on her, wide, heart still hammering. His mind was clearing, a fresh supply of oxygen letting him think more clearly.
“I’m scared,” he said. Eva nodded, resting a hand on his cheek. Still stoic as ever, always the same, unchanging, unwavering. He breathed easier at the thought.
“It is scary. But I can guarantee you it will be taken care of, manekke. Nobody will hurt you.”
He closed his eyes to blink, but found the darkness beneath a comfort, enough to wait a few seconds to open them again.
“Promise?” he asked her.
Eva froze, though only for a fraction of a breath. Then she smiled again, her eyes bearing all the weight of her words.
“I promise.”
Ryland was still crying. He couldn’t have stopped if he put his mind to it. Eva leaned back on her heels and retracted the comforting touch to dig around her pockets for tissues. She handed him one, wiped his tears with another, dabbing it gently along his cheeks.
“I’m not leaving,” she said, her voice hushed in the same way it always was at 2 am when she found him on her doorstep, a lost wanderer looking for a place to rest.
He thought she would get up, but she didn’t. She stared at him still, a few seconds too long for Ryland to not begin squirming beneath those eyes.
She put her hand back in her blazer pocket and pulled out a set of keys. She fiddled with it for a second, until she found a keyring that had a small plush mouse attached. She freed it off the rest of the set, handing it to Ryland.
“I am not a sentimental woman,” she said. He nodded, half-listening. “But this was my aunt’s last gift to me, before she got cancer. We were never close. And yet, I keep it.”
She pressed the mouse into his palm.
“You have to watch the mouse, so it doesn’t get scared. I will be back. I’m not leaving.”
Ryland held the gift in his hands, singularly focused on it. He brought it closer to himself, placed it in the crook of his neck and hugged it close with his cheek. The plush wasn’t particularly soft, hardened by external conditions and probably lack of being washed. Ryland didn’t care. It was something to focus on, again, a duty that felt just responsible enough for him.
The door shut and he startled, almost dropped the mouse. He looked in its direction instantly, but all the blinds in the room had been closed and he saw nothing of note, except that Eva was gone.
He scrambled to his feet, heart a-racing again. Still, the mouse was safely trapped on his shoulder, covered by his hand. He turned to it, blinking, trying to breathe calm again.
“No fear,” he said. “I’ll keep you safe.”
The mouse didn’t respond but it didn’t matter to him. It was his job to keep it safe, to keep it calm.
He heard loud footsteps outside the door, somebody running in soles with raised heels. The door slipped open and Eva stood there, her face red and hair tied back in a ponytail that was rapidly falling apart. She first glanced to where he’d last sat, then her eyes found him and her arms fell by her sides. She shut the door quickly.
When she walked to him, she was steady again, soft footfall on the floor. She grabbed him by the hand, led him back down to the ground.
He tried to give the mouse back to her. She refused with a smile.
“Later, Rylie. For now, it’s your friend.”
He held it closer again, nodded at Eva with all the solemnity he could muster.
“I’ll take care o’it,” the words melted into each other as he talked. “Promise.”
She nodded.
“Of course. You have my trust.”
She walked over to the table and dug around a bag laying on top of it. She unearthed her laptop, then her tablet, and a binder bursting at the seams with papers. She carried them, piled one atop the other, to where Ryland waited; where she’d left him.
She put the pile down and sat right next to him, close enough that their shoulders brushed without effort. Her hair tickled his arm but his heart was still hammering too hard to even consider a laugh.
Ryland leaned on her without so much as thinking about it, fiddling with the ears of the plush mouse. A solitary droplet would roll down his face still, in random intervals, an infinite supply of tears in his head.
Something was being waved in front of his face.
He turned to Eva. She was holding a box in her hand, a plastic organiser like that which people sometimes used to store medicine or bolts and screws. The contents rattled, barely visible through the plastic. It was translucent but dyed a dark purple and spotted with glitter.
“Yáo has a young daughter,” she said. Ryland hesitantly reached for the box with a hand, and she let him grab it, helped him lower it to the ground, to the free space in front of him. “He’s got this as a… keepsake from her. I will replenish what you use; he will never know. I doubt he’s opened it once.”
She unlatched the lid for him. Ryland pushed it open, his other hand at his mouth.
Inside were plastic beads, some with letters, some in various shapes and colours. They were sorted according to design and size, different compartments holding round beads, star-shaped ones, little half-moon shapes, butterflies, cubes, pyramids and cones. A separate compartment had a spool of translucent elastic string and small scissors.
“I was… hoping it…” she took in a deep breath. “Would keep you occupied. You can make a bracelet. I don’t know what little boys play with. I don’t have brothers.”
Ryland took the string into his hand, thinking very hard. He grabbed Eva’s hand just as she was about to reach for her laptop, prompting her to shudder. He wrapped the cord around her wrist, holding it tighter and looser until he had a vague length estimate. He unrolled the amount on the ground and marked the distance with two cube beads. He heard her open her laptop and begin typing, humming something under her breath.
He dug through the beads, separating ones that were yellow and orange from the rest. He had them piled on the ground in front of him, still in their respective categories. When they were all sorted that way, he considered the letters and picked out an E, a V and an A.
He began arranging the beads in a pattern between the two length markers. Yellow and orange were interspaced in sets of two, first solid colour beads, then something more transparent and then solid colours again, then the few beads that had a nice gradient on them, like a sunset.
His mind considered different designs, switching this bead and that around, until it looked just right, short only…
He found two blue, glittery and translucent half-moons, placed them so that they would mirror each other, like the rest of the sequence. He analysed it a bit more, running his eyes along the arrangement.
Satisfied, Ryland unwound the string and dropped the beads onto it, one after the other. Eva was typing fervently now, and the humming had turned into grumbling.
When he slid the last bead on the cord he turned to her, tapped her shoulder. She furrowed her brows and didn’t respond.
“Eva?” He asked.
“30 seconds, manekke. Important email to an asshole.”
Ryland giggled.
“Language!” he nudged her, scandalised.
“Thirty seconds, I said,” she responded. He could see she was smiling.
He rocked back and forth, impatient, twisting some of the cord between his hands. Eva sighed, rapidly pressed “backspace” a few dozen times and then clicked a few other keys with too much force.
She clicked something on her touchscreen and put the laptop to the side, now able to turn to him.
“Okay, what is it? Are you hungry?”
“I need your hand,” he said.
She lifted it, confused. Ryland grabbed it without waiting and wrapped the design around. It fit well, left him enough allowance to tie the bracelet without worrying about it pinching her skin.
He let go, let her hand drop to the floor, weightless.
“That’s it. Thanks.”
She nodded, her eyes following the motions of his hands as he reached for the scissors and cut the cord where he’d pinched it with his fingers. He twisted the two ends around each other, carefully manoeuvring them so that none of the beads slipped off in the meantime, and tied a knot, pulling it tight with all his might.
He reached for Eva’s hand again.
“That’s for you,” he said, sliding the bracelet over her wrist. “You protect me very well.”
Eva turned away, almost ripping her hand from his grasp. She lifted it up to her face, moved the bracelet around with her other hand.
Then she reached up and firmly pushed her hair behind her ear.
Her voice was strained when she spoke again.
“Thank you, Rylie. It’s very pretty.”
He set to gathering the beads back in the box, slowly growing bored but glad to have anything to do with his hands. He had the mouse help him a little, walked it around to gather the pieces spread out on the floor.
He pushed to closed box in Eva’s direction when done, smiled at her when she thanked him for cleaning up.
“Can I have hot chocolate, now?”
She nodded, her eyes something like glazed over, her face set in an impassiveness Ryland couldn’t read.
“Anything.” She said.
He didn’t understand. It did not matter.